Three days after Putin’s war against Ukraine started, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a special session of the Bundestag, proclaimed a Zeitenwende, in the sense of a historic shift.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine shattered many fundamental convictions of German politics, including “change through trade” (Wandel durch Handel), which had prevailed for decades. In a dramatic about-face, Scholz pledged massive increases in financial resources to be used for modernizing the German military.
As chancellor of the “traffic light” coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberals, he vowed to commit €100 billion to new defense funding and exceed a NATO wide annual spending goal of 2 percent of GDP. These moves to rebuild the country’s armed forces would require an “unprecedented joint effort” and would help establish Germany as a reliable and capable partner with an appropriate role in the NATO alliance.
This means that under Scholz, who served as finance minister in the last Merkel administration, Berlin’s current yearly military spending of about €50 billion, or around 1.5 percent of GDP, would increase.
Continue reading here …http://www.international-economy.com/TIE_Sp22_EngelenLetter.pdf
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